The Unity of Civilization by Various

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Title: The Unity of Civilization

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THE UNITY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED

BY

F. S. MARVIN

SOMETIME SENIOR SCHOLAR OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD

AUTHOR OF THE LIVING PAST

Humphrey Milford

Oxford University Press

London Edinburgh Glasgow New York

Toronto Melbourne Bombay

1915

PREFACE

The following essays are the substance of a course of lectures delivered at a Summer School at the Woodbrooke
Settlement, near Birmingham, in August 1915. The general purpose of the course will be apparent from the essays
themselves. No forced or mechanical uniformity of view was aimed at. The writers will be found, very naturally and
properly, to differ in detail and in the stress they lay on different aspects of the case. But they agree in thinking that while
our country's cause and the cause of our Allies is just and necessary and must be prosecuted with the utmost vigour, it is

not inopportune to reflect on those common and ineradicable elements in the civilization of the West which tend to form
a real commonwealth of nations and will survive even the most shattering of conflicts. That we on the Allied side stand
fundamentally for this ideal is one of our most valuable assets.

The fact that the lectures were delivered at a settlement for training persons for social work in a religious spirit,
suggested to more than one of those who took part in the course, how similar is the task which now lies before us in
international affairs to that which Canon Barnett initiated thirty years ago for the treatment of the social question at
home. We need in both cases to associate ourselves mentally with others in order to realize the common elements which
underlie the seeming diversity in the civilization of the West.

The method of the course was primarily historical, though certain essays have been added of a more idealist type. It is
hoped that the point of view suggested, though prompted by current events, may be found to have some permanent
value. It could obviously be applied to many other aspects of European life, e.g. morality and politics, to which
conditions of space have only permitted indirect reference to be made in this volume.

F.S.M.

CONTENTS

Page

ANALYSIS
7

Chapter
I INTRODUCTORY: THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

By F. S. MARVIN.
17

Chapter
II UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

By J.L. MYRES, Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, Oxford.
35

Chapter
III

THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME
By J.A. SMITH, Waynflete Professor of
Mental and Moral Philosophy, Oxford.

69

Chapter
IV UNITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES

By ERNEST BARKER, Fellow of New College, Oxford.
91

Chapter
V UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

By W.M. GELDART, Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford.
122

Chapter
VI THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

By the Rev. Dr. A.J. CARLYLE, University College, Oxford.
137

Chapter
VII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES
By L.T. HOBHOUSE, White Professor of Sociology,
University of London.

162

Chapter VIII THE UNITY OF WESTERN EDUCATION

By J.W. HEADLAM, late Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.
180

Chapter
IX COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES

By HARTLEY WITHERS.
198

Chapter
X

INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION
By CONSTANCE SMITH, sometime British Delegate on
International Bureau for Industrial Legislation.

222

Chapter
XI COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM

By C. DELISLE BURNS.
242

Chapter
XII THE POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE

By J.A. HOBSON.
260

Chapter XIII RELIGION AS A UNIFYING INFLUENCE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

By H.G. WOOD, late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.
280

Chapter XIV THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

by F. S. MARVIN.
301

ANALYSIS

CHAPTER I. THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

The appeal to history. Previous great schisms in Europe which have been surmounted give hope for the present. The
Reformation. The Napoleonic Wars.

The two points of view, (1) Man's nature itself tending to unity through conflict. (2) The stages in the process developed
in history.

In pre-history conflict and diversity are predominant, though the necessities of life prescribe certain uniformities.
Consolidation comes in favoured physical conditions, especially great river-basins like the Nile and the Euphrates.

The possibility of a world-unity first consciously envisaged in the Greco-Roman world. Greece gives unity in thought,
Rome in practice. Order with a solid intellectual foundation established with the Roman Empire. In the mediaeval world
a unity mainly spiritual is reached in the same framework. The position of Germany in this development. The break-up
of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The enlargement of the known world and the growth of wealth and knowledge.
This crisis still continues and has been recently accentuated by the birth-throes of nationalities. The supreme problem for
international unity is now the reconciliation of national units with the interests of the whole. Underneath the superficial
turmoil the great unifying forces of science and of common sentiments continue to grow and will ultimately prevail.

CHAPTER II. UNITY IN PREHISTORIC TIMES

Retrospect of the search for unity in man's affairs, in its political and scientific bearings.

The Unity of Man as an Animal Species. Ancient beliefs, doubts suggested by the practice of slavery, their solution, and
the modern conception of a 'Human Family'.

The unity of man as a rational animal struggling against nature for subsistence. Archaeological evidence as to the
reasonableness of primitive culture on its material side; doubts raised by man's irrational 'barbarities' on the social plane.
Lévy Bruhl's hypothesis of a 'savage logic' and the Greek analysis of wrongdoing as rooted in ignorance.

Man's struggle with Nature in the N.W. Quadrant of the Old World. Unity here not to be found in the Food Quest.
Prehistoric Europe shows variety of regimens, hoe-agriculture, pastoral nomadism. The wheel and the plough and the
composite bread and cheese culture.

Race, Language, and Culture as Factors of Unity. The spread of the European Bread Culture is earlier than that of
Indo-European Speech and probably than that of the 'Alpine' type of man. Race in Europe has led not to unity but to
discord, and linguistic affinity does not ensure mutual intelligibility.

CHAPTER III. THE CONTRIBUTION OF GREECE AND ROME

Contemporary history is the only genuine and important history, the present is the only object of historical knowledge;
what the present is and how, properly conceived, it gives history its unity and justifies the study of what is past (ancient
history); all history is our history, and otherwise without meaning or value to us. The history of classical antiquity is the
history of the youth of the modern world, of the formation of the now latent but still potent hopes, fears, designs and
thoughts which constitute the substratum of the European mind; how this still unites a divided Europe and affords a
ground of hope for a restored and deepened union. Our debt to the Greeks: (a) the very notion of civilization, (b) the
idea of its realization through knowledge, (c) the ideal of freedom as the inner spirit of true civilization. How the Greeks
failed to work all this out in both theory and practice, and how nevertheless they taught their lesson to the world; the
services of Greece to the world in the creation of Art, the Sciences, and Philosophy; the Greek ideal of a life beyond
'civilized' life, but rendered possible by it, and thus giving to civilized life a new and higher value; defects and merits of
this ideal.

The Romans are inheritors of all this; how, while making it more prosaic, they rendered it more practical and more
effectually realized it. All this most visible in the Imperial period. The Roman ideal: (a) world-wide peace, (b) secured
and maintained by a centralized system of laws issuing from and enforced by a single power. Influence of this ideal on
later and modern thought and practice. Causes of its decline and fall: (a) ignorance of the economic substructure of
civilized life, (b) neglect of opportunities to extend and defend it, (c) the rise of the idea of nationality. The Revolution as
the last great attempt to reinstate the full Roman ideal in its outworn form.

Lessons still to be learned by us from the study of both the success and the failure of Greco-Roman civilization; how the
consideration of these may at once sober our expectations and inspire us with hope in the present. The forces which
created it still maintain it and show no signs of exhaustion. But that they may continue in effect we must study these
forces and learn the lessons the ancient experience of their working conveys, exerting ourselves first to understand
Greco-Roman thought and practice and then to better their instruction.

CHAPTER IV. THE MIDDLE AGES

I. The mediaeval world. Geographical extent. Economic structure: its features of uniformity and isolation: the effect of
the rise of a national economy on mediaeval society. Linguistic basis. Mediaeval scheme that of a general European

system of estates rather than of a balance of powers.

II. The unity of mediaeval civilization in its great period (1050-1300) ecclesiastical. The attempt of the Church to
achieve a general synthesis of human life by the application of Christian principle. (1) The control of war and peace and
the feudal world: the Truce of God and the Crusades: the papacy as an international authority: the mediaeval conception
of war. (2) The control of trade and commerce and the economic world: just wages and prices: the mediaeval town. (3)
The control of learning and education and the world of thought: reconciliation of Greek science and the Christian faith:
allegorical interpretation of the world and its effects on natural science.

III. The mediaeval theory of society. The organic conception of society: mediaeval thought naturaliter Platonica. The
one society of mankind. Hence (1) little conception of the State or sovereignty or State law; but the universal society
has nevertheless to be reconciled in some way with the existence of different kingdoms. Hence, again, (2) no distinction
of Church and State as two separate societies: these are two separate authorities, regnum and sacerdotium, but they
govern the same society. The one society of mankind an ecclesiastical scheme uniting a great variety of personal
groupings.

IV. The influence of law on the development of the kingdom into the state—a process begun early in England and
France, but only generally achieved about 1500. The new conditions—geographical, economic, linguistic—which
prepare the way for the new world of the sixteenth century. The gulf between that world and the old mediaeval world.
The hope of unity to-day.

CHAPTER V. UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN LAW

The Problem in the Ancient World. Law universal and supreme over mankind (Sophocles, Antigone). Law arbitrary
and varying from place to place (Herodotus). Nature and convention. The 'rightlessness' of the stranger in antiquity. The
law was a 'law of citizens'. Admission of the foreigner to legal protection. Rome develops a law of the men of all nations
(ius gentium), which reacts upon the law of citizens (ius civile), and ultimately coalesces with it. The law of nature.

The break-up of the Ancient World; the Middle Ages. The invaders bring their own law with them. In the kingdoms
which they founded each man had his 'personal law'. Local Law. Feudal Law. The beginnings of National Law:
England, France, Germany. Roman Law in the Middle Ages. The Canon Law.

The Modern World. The reception of Roman Law. State Sovereignty. The Modern Codes. Unity and diversity of law
within the political unit. The world divided into territories of the English Common Law and lands where Roman Law
conceptions prevail. Forces making for unity: the notion of a 'law of nature'; the pursuit of common ends. International
law, private and public.

CHAPTER VI. THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

The question of the place of nationality in art and literature. It has little or no place in the Middle Ages. The mediaeval
epic; its character. The mediaeval romance. Modern European art and literature transcends national conditions. The
characteristics of the new European literature of the fourteenth century: Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer. The drama of
England and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Painting and sculpture from the fourteenth to the
seventeenth century. The classical mind, and the principle of good taste and common sense. The realism of Defoe and
Hogarth, and the Spanish Picaresque novel. Sentimentalism in the eighteenth century. The poetry and painting of nature.
The great revolution and the romantic movement. Great literature and art are not national but human.

CHAPTER VII. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Western civilization possesses a certain unity (1) in the sense of unity of character, (2) in the fact that it has a common
origin, ultimately in the Greco-Roman civilization but more immediately in mediaeval Christendom, and (3) in the sense
that its parts have maintained a constant intercommunication of ideas. (4) The different qualities of German, French, and
English thinkers have in large measure complemented one another, (5) and the history of science and of speculative
philosophy is largely a history of the interaction of distinct national schools. (6) The same thing is true of political
thought. (7) Thus the world of thought forms a commonwealth which is superior to all national differences and, in spite
of the war, remains a foundation of a very genuine unity.

CHAPTER VIII. UNITY IN EDUCATION

Distinction between Unity and Uniformity. Historical Unity; the origin of the School and the University. Both instruments
of the mediaeval Church for maintaining a common system throughout Western Christendom. Importance of Latin as
the universal language of education. Suppression of the vernacular and of national movements. The Reformation; a
common European movement. Erasmus. The new teaching based on classical literature. Tendency to disunion; the
influence of the Reformation and the national Churches. Growth of national literature. Political influences, the French
Revolution, and the National State. The essential Unity still preserved, not merely in the study of the natural sciences,
but in the historical unity given by Christianity and the spirit of Greece.

CHAPTER IX. COMMERCE AND FINANCE

Commerce and finance practical expressions of the instinct of self-preservation which is common not only to all men,
but to all living creatures. Early appearance of trading habit in boys. Early examples of trade. Abraham's purchase of a

burying-ground from Ephron the Hittite. Solomon's trade with Hiram of Tyre. Herodotus, the first historian, opens his
history with an allusion to trade. Trade is based on specialization, and is at once a cause of unity and of disunion. Its
extension from individuals to communities. Foreign trade stimulated by variations of value in different communities.
Specialization increases efficiency, but makes the worker a machine, and a speculator on the chance that others will
want what he makes. International trade also promotes both unity and friction. On the whole, commerce a great
promoter of unity. Likewise finance, or money-dealing. Its origin and development. London's catholic taste in foreign
securities: sometimes prefers them to the home-made article. Effect of foreign investment on home production and
consumption. Foreign finance and productive specialization.

CHAPTER X. INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION

Interdependence true of countries as of classes. A fact brought home to us by the European War. Importance of
international action in relation to the raising of social and industrial standards. This truth perceived by Robert Owen a
century ago. Work of Owen and his successors in the direction of an international minimum of labour conditions. Action
of the Swiss Federal Council. The German Emperor calls the first Conference on workmen's protection 1890. Formal
failure and substantial achievement of this Conference. Founding of International Association for Labour Legislation and
International Labour Office. Constitution and work of these bodies. Biennial conferences of the association: subjects
and methods. International Conventions of 1906, their scope and value. Subsequent labours of the Association. Its
present position and future hopes.

CHAPTER XI. COMMON IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORM

Ideals arise from perceived social evils. They have caused in recent years (a) Common action by European
Governments and (b) action by separate Governments influenced by foreign experience. There has also been a growth
of sentiment, not yet embodied in law or institutions, with regard to (i) the position of women and children, (ii) social
caste, and (iii) the increase of common action for reform by civilized states.

CHAPTER XII. THE POLITICAL BASES OF A WORLD-STATE

The nineteenth century has made three great contributions towards the possibility of International Government, the
political realization of nationality, the growth in substance and method of international law, and the progress of
federalism. In other fields outside politics, especially in commerce and finance, a network of international co-operation
has grown up. Closer political union is needed for three purposes: first, the consolidation, extension, and improved
sanctions of existing international law; secondly, the settlement of differences between nations; thirdly, positive co-
operation for the common good. This progress involves some further diminution of 'sovereignty' and 'independence'. But
these concepts have no absolute validity. In the Hague Conventions and other intergovernmental instruments the
rudiments of international government already exist. In order to establish effective security for peace, what is needed is a
general treaty providing that all disputes be submitted to arbitration or conciliation, with such guarantees for acceptance
of the award as will establish confidence. The test of confidence is the voluntary reduction of armaments.
Internationalists differ as to the nature and rigour of the sanctions. Some rely entirely on a 'moratorium' and the pressure
of public opinion: others would compel the submission of all issues, but not the acceptance of awards: others, again,
would apply force, diplomatic, economic, or military, to both processes.

Internationalism, to be effective, would require a machinery for dealing with new issues before they ripened into
disputes. How far will the state of mind following this war assist this progress of internationalism? Is a spiritual
conversion, corresponding to the process of biological mutatism, possible or probable?

CHAPTER XIII. RELIGION

The history of Europe suggests that, though the Church exerted a considerable influence on the growth of a common
type of civilization in the West, in modern times religion has proved a divisive rather than a unifying factor. During the
last generation or two, however, there has been a decline of the dogmatic and sectarian tempers. This change is largely
due to the growth of the scientific spirit, and, as in other realms of inquiry so in the study of religion, international co-
operation has steadily developed. Both literary criticism and psychological analysis have contributed to the widening of
sympathy. The better understanding of certain elements in the Christian ideal and the Christian hope must also be taken
into consideration as a factor making for a new catholicism which finds expression in movements like the Adult School
Movement and the Student Christian Movement, and in the ever-growing demand for closer co-operation in missionary
work.

Beyond this, partly through the comparative study of religions, we are conscious that religious thought in the West
possesses some common characteristics, notably, faith in the solidarity of mankind and in the reality of progress. Of
themselves, these two convictions do not constitute any very close bond of union, and both beliefs need to be defined
and enforced by the sense of sin and the consciousness of God which the West has learned from Jesus.

CHAPTER XIV. THE GROWTH OF HUMANITY

The need of a basis of right sentiments even greater than that of improved political machinery to secure international
union. We must start from patriotism and enlighten and enlarge it. Of the three Western nations which lead in the arts
and sciences, France and England through the war become closely allied in defence of a policy of the union of free and
pacific people throughout the world. The position of Italy, Russia, and the United States. The increase of arbitral

methods and the formation of leagues of peace or even of a world-state are matters calling for earnest thought; but the
spread of the notion of humanity, the co-operation of all mankind in a common work is more fundamental and may be
begun by any one at home. This idea, starting with the Stoics, is fully developed with the advent of modern science. It
shows itself in many forms and the spread of exact science is its most powerful aid. This is entirely independent of
nationality and will be increasingly concerned with the alleviation of human suffering and the improvement of life.

The final test of a high international aim is the joint effort of the stronger peoples to protect and assist the weaker and
less advanced. The case of Africa and the Brussels Conference of 1889. Analogy with the treatment of the young at
home.

I

THE GROUNDS OF UNITY

In face of the greatest tragedy in history, it is to history that we make appeal. What does it teach us to expect as the
issue of the conflict? How far and in what form may we anticipate that the unity of mankind, centring as it must round
Europe, will emerge from the trial?

Only two occasions occur to the mind on which, since the break up of the Roman Empire, a schism so serious as the
present has threatened the unity of the Western world. The first was the Reformation and the war which it entailed
down to the Peace of Westphalia. The second was the struggle against Napoleon, terminated a hundred years ago. The
latter was in many respects a closer parallel. It was a struggle of the independent nations of Europe against the
overweening ambition and aggression of one Power. It united them in an alliance which achieved its purpose and
survived the successful issue of the war for some years. Some such course, with a comity of nations far wider and more
enduring than the Holy Alliance as its sequel, we hope and predict for the present war.

The struggle at the Reformation was less like the present, either in its causes or its course, but it has some features
which make it a useful point for a survey of the permanent unifying elements which hold and will hold the West together
in spite of occasional cataclysms and the clash of rival interests and passion. A man like Erasmus, trembling before the
catastrophe, willing to make immense sacrifices to avoid an open breach, uncertain of any final readjustment which
might restore the harmony of the world, was not unlike some among us who hoped against hope that the enemy might
be appeased, who thought that almost any peace was better than any war, who still fear that the breach in unity is vital
or irreparable for generations.

And the issue three hundred years ago may also inspire us with a cautious optimism, a strong though not unmeasured
trust. The right cause triumphed, fully in the end. Freedom was secured, both for churches and for individuals,
throughout the world. The evil features in the papal system, against which the attack was really levelled, quietly but
completely disappeared, and the institution survived, itself reformed. Before a hundred years were out the world had
moved on to the conquest of new vantage points and the establishment of a wider unity on a firmer base.

Both previous occasions are therefore full of hope. The European system is, as we shall see throughout these essays,
the necessary nucleus of any civilized order embracing the whole world; and the great convulsions which have hitherto
continued to occur in it from time to time are moments of especial value for the study of the conditions under which it
exists. They are the pathological experiences which reveal the strength and the weaknesses of the normal functions. We
strive and hope for a more lasting state of general health, and do not despair of the patient even in this grave attack. He
has survived even more serious illness. For though the present war is the most gigantic that the world has ever seen, its
very greatness is the result of some of those modern developments—scientific skill, improved communications, national
cohesion—on which ultimately the better organization of the whole commonwealth of nations will be built. Passi
graviora; we have weathered the storms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the old Roman order and its
sequel in the Catholic Church were at their weakest and the recuperative power of science and social reform and
nationalism had hardly begun its work. We shall not fail with our greater forces of the present to regain and create a
Europe freer, stronger, and more united than that which now seems to be shaken to the depths.

The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of the world, like all the aspects of human evolution,
must be regarded from two points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What does the nature of man itself
demand? How has this nature expressed itself, and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography,
climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of its appearance has imposed?

Looked at in itself, so far as we can isolate it from its surroundings, man's nature is distinguished from that of lower
animals by two features, both of them essentially social and tending to unity. He is more deeply and permanently
attached to members of his own species, by affection, sympathy, veneration, tradition, than any other creature. And he
is a reasoning being, reason itself requiring the contact and agreement of various minds. The incomparably greater force
which he has acquired in the world, over all other species and over nature itself, is due to the working of these two
factors. At starting he was physically less strong than many other creatures, and if he fought with others of his own kind,
other animal species did the same. He was ahead of them by his reason, and reason acted, and must act, through the
concert of thinking beings. This concert is not merely, or even mainly, an attachment among those living at the same time

to co-operate for some common end; it is with man a conscious sequence of one generation on another. Sometimes the
movement of adaptation is slower, sometimes quicker, but in every case the living are carrying on the work of the dead,
and their co-operation in time as well as space is due to the working of the same qualities of attachment and reason, the
social factors, by which at any moment a community of men is bound together.

Still looking at the matter a priori, it is clear that the vast community of mankind, though it has come more closely in
contact in recent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually and momentarily, through many smaller
aggregates. Of these the leading types are the family and the country or nation. The former is not directly relevant to our
inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. The former is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation and the
like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. The latter has been shaped by geographical conditions,
by racial qualities, by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger units of human society raises the most
difficult, fundamental and unavoidable questions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of the present war.
To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would be to establish the everlasting peace.

Western society, indeed the whole community of mankind, is built up of these smaller units, the family and the nation,
with their various intermediate groupings, but the historical process has by no means conformed at all exactly to this
logical order. Society has not been made in orderly fashion by forming families and then combining families to make
hundreds, and hundreds to make counties, and counties nations, and so on to the whole. A German god might have
done this, but the way of nature and history was less perfect. The minor forms of human association have been taking
shape, being altered and on the whole improved, throughout the process. At one point, of high importance for our
argument, a larger form of association was achieved before the necessary constituent elements were articulated. This
was the Greco-Roman world encircling the Mediterranean and completed in the Roman Empire of the second century
A.D. It was the nucleus from which the Western world of modern civilization has been developed; yet it was there,
settled in its main outlines, before the national units which it required for internal harmony and cohesion had taken any
definite shape. It is to the difficulties of their growth and mutual adjustment that we owe most of the conflicts of modern
history.

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with
superhuman insight and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization would pursue. All over the
world, for tens of thousands of years, a culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a similarity
which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely severed by distance and climatic conditions. The raw
material of the human product in science, art, and invention was alike in texture although often exuberant in detail and
imagination. But it had not yet the unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious of itself.

To gain the cohesion of large numbers of men by whom wealth could be created and sufficient leisure and independence
secured for an intellectual life, not dictated by the necessities of existence, a special concurrence of favourable physical
conditions was required. The rich and secluded river-basins of many parts of the world provided this, and in
consequence we find similar large communities arising at the end of the Stone Age in such places as China, Peru,
Mexico, and above all in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The last named derived their special importance for the sequel from
their proximity to the Mediterranean, which was to act as the great meeting-place and training-school for adventurous
spirits and inquiring minds. From the busy intercourse of these land-locked waters arose the civilization called Minoan,
or Aegean, centring in Crete, itself to be surpassed by the trading activity of the Phoenicians and the art and science of
the Greeks.

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon the claim of the Mediterranean to be the birthplace of the
highest type of human civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was to spread, until, by material force as
well as by the conquering mind, the European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race. The
supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions, as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the
city-state. For our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and the first the most important of all.

The city-state was important as the first example of a free, self-governing community in which the individual realized his
powers by living—and dying—with and for his fellows. This new type of human community was of the highest moment
in the sequel. In many points it was a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement of the
Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers, especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest
and some of the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But it never acquired the permanence of
the political units needed to build up the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and the Greeks
were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on
which a modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all in their science and philosophy, that we find the
most fundamental and lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind. When these became
allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established, which
has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The
Greek unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a corresponding work of organization in the
human world which lay nearest to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were of priceless
value and continuing effect, but both were, from the conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but
precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on the material accumulated by generations of
Chaldean and Egyptian priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact observations of geometry and

astronomy the elements of unity in diversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing and correcting
individual facts, he arrived at the first equations in mathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and in
that of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupation of the Mediterranean world was complete. It
died out gradually in the theological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side ended in Stoicism with an
amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. The Stoic Empire of the second century A.D. was the high-water
mark of the joint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism in thought and practice. Its brilliance while
it lasted the nobility of its leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, are the measure of our debt to
the builders of the Greco-Roman world.

The Roman contribution to the result which in the end so perfectly combined both movements was, in its origin and
nature, singularly unlike the Greek. The Roman did not analyse his conceptions. He accepted what came to him, either
from his ancestors or from other peoples, without scrutiny, except so far as to see that new matter could be worked
into old forms without a dislocation in practice. He was the pragmatist, the Greek the idealist. This instinct of adaptation
and sequence made the Roman the pioneer in law as the Greek was the pioneer in science. It rendered possible the
holding together in one political system of the multifarious territories and peoples from the Tigris to the Solway Firth for
long enough to enable the greater part of that area to be permanently civilized on Roman lines. But, like the artist's
sketch of his picture, the whole was outlined before the parts were worked out in their final form; and the sketch itself
was seriously imperfect in more than one point. The set-back which Augustus received on the eastern side of the Rhine
was never made good, and the Germanic tribes therefore remained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and
eighth centuries resumed the work on other lines. This defeat of Varus and the legend of Hermann became to the
German a symbol of national greatness in a sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever assumed.
To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman
occupation. To us the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret that we had to do over
again many of the things which he had once taught us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no
longer the Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire, and though the ancient world fired
his imagination, he always saw it through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the framework of the Roman Empire and extended
the area of moral and civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman missionaries, some by way of England and
Ireland, went further than the Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest. Germany in the
later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest
lieutenants. The moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to sides of human nature which Greece
and Rome had left untouched, was nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus lifted at
least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and
military nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement of the Middle Ages. Rome had given the
framework of a great system, and into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks, Huns, Moors,
Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when they swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant
hordes, and in the area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as nations, mingling with the earlier
population and divided up by the geographical configurations of the Continent. Among them France and England had
the advantage. They gained their unity as nations earlier than any other countries of the West—England in a form which
has lasted substantially unaltered for six hundred years. Spain, which had been torn asunder by the Moors, was not
consolidated fully till the end of the fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders under Columbus in quest of
fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic. But Italy and Germany—and especially the latter—remained disintegrated
until our own time. Both gained their union about the same time, fifty years ago, but by different methods and in a
different spirit. Italy, naturally a compact geographical unit, was welded by a democratic enthusiasm, of which Cavour
and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi the right arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenched in
the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into national life at the same democratic moment. She was
fashioned into political existence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealt shattering blows on friends as well
as foes, in Austria as well as France, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kings and great
ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among states offers the most serious problem in adjusting national
claims with European unity. We have to check and to assimilate—if the world is to live as one—the one Power which
has hitherto developed most persistently and successfully its own resources, but least in subordination to the interests of
the whole.

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organization as somewhat of an obstruction, who would
prefer a simple internationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passions and attachments, its constant
liability to explosion, its slow progress by tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Many
reformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude in regard to the smaller institution, the family, which
is often found to be an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home. Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan
constitution as the goal of all human effort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance must be kept and
the full value both of family and nation maintained against theories or tendencies which would roll us all out into
cosmopolitan items. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity of European society will tend to correct
the perspective.

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It lasted for between four and five hundred years. The
unity which supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured for a thousand. Less binding on
one side, it was more searching and pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full force over many
millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have
absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of
cognate and derivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in the moral and intellectual sphere. We shall
speak later of the more perfect and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and the Renascence
tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of
knowledge and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a more complete community of scholars
than has perhaps been ever witnessed in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love of truth,
or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from
Oxford to Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit at the feet of some world-famous
teacher.

And the wandering scholar was by no means the only social link. Many of the trade-routes surprise us by the length and
adventurousness of their course. Amber from the Baltic found its way to the south of Italy and Spain, while small boats
from Ireland were brought into the mouths of the Loire and the Garonne when the coasts of the Channel were
impassable through barbarians from the North.

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the modern traveller would expect, and this was mainly due
to the influence of the Church. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, and when a man like Erasmus
surveyed the prospect at the beginning of the sixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determined
abstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the one organized body which represents the old
united culture of Christendom and might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness and disorder in ever-
widening circles on the globe. For it must be noted that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the
unity of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were extending, East and West, the sphere in which the
European was to impose his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth century thus becomes one,
perhaps the most critical, of all the turning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope, disorder with
new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yet been surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight
into the nature of the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work more fully in the direction of unity in
the civilized world, of healthy independence in the parts and a growing harmony in the whole. Little of this could have
been seen by the observer at the outbreak of the Reformation.

Nationalism, democracy, colonial expansion, religious change, the growth of knowledge and its application to industry
and social reform, these are the salient features which distinguish our modern from the mediaeval world, and we have to
consider how far they make for the unity of mankind.

The sixteenth century saw both the strengthening of national governments and the beginning of European colonization.
England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, all settled down under a central government stronger and more independent
than they had previously enjoyed, and pegged out estates for themselves beyond the seas. In each case wars have been
entailed in the process, and, as we know, the backwardness of Germany at this period has been visited upon the rest of
Europe tenfold in recent times. National expansion thus appears to be an eminent provocation of international strife. It is
with no intention either of ignoring facts or minimizing dangers that one turns here to the other side of the account.
Where was the spark actually fired which led to the present conflagration? In that part of Europe where the national
units were least stable and developed, where the conditions of government and social order are most remote from our
own. Who can doubt that if in the Balkans the Turks had been able to establish even the sort of government we
maintain in India, or if, still better, the Balkan States, apart from the Turks, had gained their own independence in a
federation like the Swiss, the aggression of the Central Powers would have been checked? The compact, well-
established national unit is not in itself a danger, but there is a danger in weak, oppressed, or disjointed nationalities,
who have not found safety and offer a bait to their expansive neighbours.

Thus strong and independent nations, as Kant postulates in his Perpetual Peace, are guarantees of peace, stones in the
Temple of Humanity. Another consideration not generally recognized, strengthens this conclusion. In recent years all
leading and progressive nations have been devoting their first thought to social reform. This has been conspicuously the
case with ourselves, with the French, with the United States, with the smaller, more advanced countries in Europe.
Germany, too, though her first energies have been given to organizing war, has had in this matter two distinct souls. Her
social democrats and part of her governing class have been consistent and successful in working for the amelioration of
the condition of the people, and have often anticipated other nations in her process. It is self-evident, first, that a strong
national government is needed to carry out wide social reform, second, that in proportion as governments devote
themselves whole-heartedly to this, their energies are less likely to be devoted to molesting their neighbours. Germany,
unfortunately for herself and the world, had no government which could speak for the whole people and be responsible
to it. A truly national government in Germany, or anywhere else, would not have willed this war.

The colonial expansion which was connected with the outburst of national sentiment in the sixteenth century, and has led
to frequent conflicts between European nations ever since, also appears in a different light if we study it in view of facts
not dreamt of in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Americas, which appeared to the early navigators as rich
estates to be cultivated for the benefit of proprietors at home, have developed into powerful and independent countries,

eminently pacific (except for internal brawls), looking forward to producing new types of life and government, hoping
perhaps to hold the balance in a long-drawn contest of the Old World Powers. The circle, therefore, of the
Mediterranean world which was enlarged by the discoveries of the sixteenth century, finds its completion to-day in new
states across the Atlantic, which are on the whole enormously preponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their
own in Western civilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms. To us, too, it is clear, and will be one day
to the Germanic Powers, that the British Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, is essentially a league of
free peoples, under no compulsion from the centre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by any third
party, strong from their general contentment with the conditions and institutions of their life, and not through any
systematic regulations imposed from above. Even India and other protected states and dominions, though not yet self-
governing, are moving steadily in the direction of responsibility and of willing association with the British Empire or
Commonwealth as a whole.

Such is the much vaster community of nations which has succeeded to the Western Europe of the sixteenth century; and
no mention has been made of the place of Russia or the countries still further east. The picture does not suggest a welter
of conflicting passions and ambition throughout the world. On the whole a mass of men and women labouring with fair
contentment at their daily task, not concerned that their state or nation should extend its boundaries, least of all that it
should provoke attack; little conscious of the historic debt of nations to one another, but wishing well to others except
when they cross the path of a personal desire; gaining rapidly more sense of actual community among living men, but
hardly realizing yet how man's power has been built up in the past and how infinitely it might be advanced and the...